Embodiments herein generally relate to a cleaning system and method for friction rollers and more particularly to situations where the user places a printing device in a cleaning mode, inserts a cleaning apparatus into a paper supply tray of the printing device, and executes a cleaning operation on the printing device.
Friction retard feeders (FRF) have feed, retard, and nudger roll materials designed for maximum roll life, which reduces the need for customer or customer service engineer (CSE) roll replacement. As a result, the slow rate of wear of the rolls results in gradual contamination of the rolls from paper dust and debris. This, in turn, causes degradation in the roll coefficient of friction (COF) resulting in increased misfeed rates. This is especially true for the nudger roll, which advances the top sheet(s) into a feed nip, and the feed roll itself, which drives the top sheet through the retard nip. The countermeasure for this is to clean or replace the appropriate rolls. Customers are very resistant to take the time to do this since the machines using the FRF technology are typically walk-up machines with untrained and/or disinterested operators.
Since cleaning or replacing the nudger or feed rolls takes training and time and some rolls are not even accessible to the operator, a better method for roll cleaning that takes little or no training and time to maintain COF and reduce the misfeed shut down rate (SDR) would be useful.